When Elias ran it, his monitor didn't flicker. Instead, the room felt suddenly, unnervingly quiet. A window opened, displaying a live feed of a hallway. It was low-resolution, grainy, and bathed in the sickly green of night vision. He recognized the wallpaper immediately. It was the hallway outside his own study.

He froze. In the video, he could see the door to his room. Then, a figure appeared at the far end of the hall. It wasn't moving like a person; it moved in frames, twitching forward with every refresh of the software.

Elias looked at the door. It was closed. He looked back at the screen. The figure was now standing directly in front of the door in the video. It reached for the handle.

The link was buried in a 2009 thread on a defunct hardware forum, sandwiched between complaints about driver updates. It had no description, just a filename: .

Elias heard the physical click of his real doorknob turning. He didn't look up. He just watched the screen as the door in the video swung open to reveal... nothing. The room in the video was empty.

He realized then that the "Observation Protocol" wasn't watching his house. It was watching a version of his life that was exactly ten seconds ahead of his own. He had ten seconds to decide where to run before the figure on the screen reached the chair where he was currently sitting.